Writing women in the Netherlands before 1900
Thanks to the digitizing project “The International Reception of Women’s Writing” (2004-2007) a large number of Dutch women who wrote and published has been traced: more than 700. A provisional list of names can be consulted in the database WomenWriters: presented in a chronological or in an alphabetical order.
This is considerably more than the 160 women writers who had been presented and discussed in the 1997 anthology of Dutch women's writing between 1550 and 1850, entitled Met en zonder Lauwerkrans (With and without Laurels). Nearly all of those 160 have been included in the database WomenWriters, not all however. Indeed, one of our leading principles being to consider authors from the side of contemporary reactions toward their publications, it seemed unjustified to include those women for whom no early reception traces had been found. 150 of them are included here: in alphabetical and chronological order: 126 of them active in the Netherlands, 24 in (the territory of present-day) Belgium. (Note that literary relations between these two countries, existing as such only since halfway the 19th century, are to be studied in detail).
Many of these figures are still enigmatic: archives will be consulted, works will be analyzed; information contained in WomenWriters is - although to be considered as raw material - is also in itself revealing. For example
Writers considered individually
either traditionally well known:
Geertruida Bosboom-Toussaint
Agatha Deken
Elisabeth Wolff
becoming visible since the last years:
Belle van Zuylen (Isabelle de Charrière)
Margareta Cambon-van der Werken
or much less famous:
Anna Ampt
Judith Bouiller
Jeanne Clant van der Mijll-Piepers
Writers considered by category
Dutch women writing in French
SvD, May 2009
- Note that when arriving in the database WomenWriters your status will be "not logged on", meaning that your access to the database is limited. For complete access (and participation in the project), contact Suzan van Dijk.
- The production side > Dutch authors